The flood water is a bright mirror through the trees. It sometimes reaches from the river into the woods, drowning the roots of the ash, beech, oak, alder, and willow, but today the carr, the wet woodland, is relatively dry. The scars of recent storms are visible. Fallen boughs and a few toppled trees. Everything looks aglow and alive under the morning sun. It is the Saturday after Norfolk County Council announced that they were withdrawing the planning application for the Norwich Western Link and I am walking through woodland that borders the wet pastures of the Wensum flood plain, woodland that would have been partly destroyed by the planned dual carriageway.

At this time of year, the woods look stripped back. The last of the stubborn oak leaves have fallen. The nettles have turned to straw and collapsed into the leaf mould. You would be forgiven for thinking the wood dormant, in slumber, but it’s just biding its time. Even now, the snowdrops crowd the woodland floor in the wet woodland.

Look carefully. There are the hazel catkins, like the tails of miniature green squirrels. There are the black buds of the ash tree, all folded potential. If you had thermal imaging equipment and viewed the veteran oaks, you might detect, beneath the old and flaking bark, the red and yellow hot spots of the huddled bats—barbastelle, natterers, noctule, pipistrelles—all found roosting in these woods. Even they are not completely dormant. On warmer winter nights, the barbastelle, dressed in its thick black coat of fur, might go for brief forays to restock on food.

Listen carefully. Be still. On a bright January morning like this, there is an anticipatory liveliness. A wren, strident, determined to sing, but not quite, not yet—give it a week or two. Long-tailed tits call in an exuberant chase through the canopy. A great tit scolds me. A buzzard is mewing as it glides its slow circuit and then later, almost collides with me, its talons falling, before deciding at the last moment not to alight on the tree I’m leaning against. Coal tits. Goldcrests. I count over fourteen species of bird. Further off, somewhere over the flood waters, comes the sound of teal and mallards. A crash, three roe deer clumsy in the undergrowth, spooked by my presence.

Crouch now. Even the woodland floor isn’t dormant. Spiders and beetles are all business. Lift a fallen branch and find woodlice, or a slug, curled like a thumb, waiting for dark. Soon the woodland flora will be pushing up through the decaying leaves, greening the woodland floor. Bluebells. Moscahtel. Yellow archangel. Dogs’ mercury. Garlic mustard. Ramsons.

I check on the badger sett on the woodland edge. In the summer it hides in an impenetrable thicket of nettles, but now I can see the labyrinth of entrances, some evidence of fresh digging. A latrine with a fresh deposit. Signs of tree scratching. And then a buzzing unexpectedly above me. Wild bees. They are nesting under the loose bark of one of the large oaks. They dance around the sun-warmed entrance to their nest.

There is little doubt that this corner of Norfolk, this patch of the Wensum Valley, is special. The Wensum Valley is a green refuge, a haven, a rare area of patchworked and interconnected habitats that have not been heavily impacted by large scale infrastructure development. There is a complexity to the web of life here that would be impossible to recreate. How do you grow a four-hundred-year-old oak from scratch? Only on a timescale that doesn’t compute with developers and their biodiversity matrixes. It helps, of course, to have a great many hundred plus year old oaks to hand, trees that will now no longer be felled, and so stand a chance of becoming veterans. And ancient trees, especially when they are native tree species, are special for the sheer complexity and abundance of the life they can support. The loss of irreplaceable habitat that supports rare and protected species is a loss that cannot be mitigated for, and if mitigation cannot be successful then development that leads to the destruction of that habitat should not take place.

I can hear the distant swoosh of the car tyres on the Northern Broadway, the sharp drone of motorcycle engines accelerating along the Fakenham Road—weekend bikers. I can finally stand here without a sense of anticipatory grief for the arrival of chainsaws and earthmovers, knowing that this wood has a future again, that it won’t become carriageway or hard shoulder—a place of litter, noise, toxicity, and death. Norfolk Wildlife Trust, and the many other individuals and organisations who have taken a stand and, backed by strong scientific evidence, campaigned for many years to prevent the Western Link road from being built, did so not because it was the easy decision, not because it wouldn’t make them enemies at times, but because it was undoubtedly the right thing to do.

The anticipatory grief isn’t over. The relief over the Norwich Western Link might yet be only temporary. And there are other concerns, the Wash Barrier Scheme for one. Such coalitions of wildlife organisations and individuals can make a real difference to standing up to those who wish to pit growth against nature. We have already lost too much in our nature depleted nation. Now is the time to encourage more havens for nature. Now is the time to help nature not just to recover, but to thrive.